


Restless Night

by sisaat



Series: Sleepless Nights [1]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen, Insomnia, Literal Sleeping Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 16:39:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10194125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisaat/pseuds/sisaat
Summary: Parker can't sleep, and she's not the only one.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Have another self-indulgent story with no plot.

Parker can't sleep. She's restless after a job that had her on high alert without anything coming out of that. Like she's still waiting for the danger that never came. She almost wants some of the mark's henchmen to burst into her warehouse to avenge him, just to relieve the tension. She gives up on the bed and tries the vents.

Her warehouse doesn't have vents, it's a single room so there's no need or space for them, but there's an office building nearby with nice, large vents. It's deserted this time of the night. It doesn't even have security. She gets in and crawls to her favorite spot to sleep in, somewhere a good distance from any entry points. No one can get to her here without being noticed. She'll either hear them or feel the metal under her moving with their weight. She's safe.

She's also alone. Which isn't usually a problem, and often is the point, but tonight she doesn't like it. And being surrounded by metal in an empty building just makes it more obvious how alone she is. Isolated. She's been alone most of her life and she had believed it was better this way, but it wasn't. She's restless today because she'd been expecting danger and it didn't come, but alone it would have. No one would have had her back. Danger not coming is a good problem to have.

Vents weren't working tonight. She's safe, but just as restless for a different reason. It's time to move on to Safe Spot Number Two. It's not as close, but the run there will do her some good.

Her destination is a nondescript townhouse, identical to the ones surrounding it. Its only identifying feature visible from the street level is a window box filled with herbs hanging from the kitchen window. There's no lights on. She climbs up to the bedroom window and peers inside. The bed is unmade but empty, so she keeps climbing. All the way to the roof and its garden. There's no light turned on here either, but she can see a figure moving among the plants. 

She thinks Eliot must sleep more than ninety minutes a day, but she still finds him here tending his garden at all kinds of hours. Like right now, he's holding the weird scissors he calls 'pruning shears' and he's doing gardening things to a shrub. Parker settles herself in a dark corner of the roof and watches him work. She'll be invisible here unless he turns on the floodlights and he's not going to do that without a good reason. It would make him too visible to potential snipers.

He knows she's there, she knows  he does, but she stays quiet and he doesn't acknowledge her. He's bare-footed, wearing jogging pants and an undershirt, with his hair loosely tied back. He's calm, but Parker doesn't think he was when he came up here. She remembers the unmade bed with its tangled sheets. He's having a restless night too. All his nights are restless as far as she can tell. But he's calm now, and he hasn't told her to leave yet. 

It's another fifteen minutes before Eliot brings the shears back to the toolbox, washes his hands with the hose and head towards the door.

"Come in or don't, but lock the door," he tells her without looking at her corner. He leaves the door partially open for her. She wonders if he would come back to check it if she doesn't come in.

She follows inside, locks the door behind her (with several deadbolts, a latch and an actual steel bar because Eliot is a little old-fashioned) and makes her way through the dark to where she knows his bedroom is. She hasn't been here often, but she has the layout memorized. He's sitting on the edge of his bed when she gets there, slipping off his hair tie and shaking his hair free. He doesn't asks her questions, doesn't say anything when she slips in under the covers on the other side. He just lies down on his side facing the window in case someone should burst in that way during the night (through the bulletproof glass of a window that she knows doesn't open).

Parker inches back into Eliot's half of the bed, then some more until her back presses against his. There. Other than the vents, this is the safest place she knows. Right in Eliot's personal space. She's safe, she's not lonely and, unlike the vents, Eliot might make her pancakes in the morning. This is nice. She can sleep like this. And maybe he could, too.


End file.
